One of the most common search marketing mistakes I see people make is in trusting the wrong tools and data points. The best (or maybe worst) example of this is probably keyword research. People are consistently taking specific daily or monthly traffic estimates as gospel. Let's take a look at five reasons this may be the case.

1) Limited Data Sources

The problem with a lot of tools is that even if they pull real search queries, they pull them from limited or narrow sources. If a tool is grabbing a select amount of data from a certain type of source (meta search engines, ISP providers, etc.) you're not getting usage data from your actual target market (searchers on different engines and from different ISPs have different user profiles, and won't necessarily map to the types of searcher you're trying to attract).

For instance Microsoft has some slick keyword tools, but they use Bing data. If you're a technology company seeing 80+ percent of your traffic from Google, you might need to think twice before trusting the Microsoft tools.

2) Estimates Are...Well, Just Estimates

Even if you do get access to a source of data that syncs up to the searches you're targeting pretty well, the numbers you get as "estimated traffic value" are often not that actionable. For instance, in the example above, you could jump over to the Google tool. Problem solved, right?

In the above image (click to enlarge), we see that a rounded estimate is returned, and the estimate is acutally of all the traffic for this and related keywords. That's a really important point! While it's certainly not a secret nor is it hidden within the interface, many people miss the fact that these are rounded estimates for a portfolio of keywords. You can drill down and get a more specific estimate by changing the drop down above to "phrase" or "exact" match, but even then you're still getting a rounded estimate of all the search traffic Google has for that term. What if you're a small shop trying to figure out how to rank? You can't be sure you'll rank number one for things like "it consulting firm", and even if you rank number one you won't get all the traffic.

3) Not Enough Ideas

Similarly, what if all of the above ideas are too competitive for your business or website? After all, every single IT consulting firm can get those keywords for free, and there are only around 200 ideas:

We can grab these and another fifty, but the odds of our missing out on a lot of potential opportunities (and being led down a too-competitive path) are quite high.

4) Measuring Using the Wrong Metrics

Another trouble spot is which numbers these tools are giving you. Beyond the basic idea that certain traffic estimates may be inaccurate, tools often give other misleading metrics, such as KEI. KEI stands for keyword effectiveness index. KEI references the number of documents that reference a given term. This is a very imperfect measure of competitiveness, because ultimately you're not competing against every mention of a keyword: you're only trying to outrank the top ten results! Using a tool like SEO for FireFox to look at a lot of different numbers (number of links indexed by Yahoo! number of quality links like .edus, etc.) to measure how competitive a word is is really a much better (if also imperfect) means of discovering what competition may look like.

5) The Data Isn't Yours!

This is the biggest one: ultimately these estimates can lead you down the wrong path because they reference general data. The problem here is that just because someone else can rank for a term doesn't mean you can, and the fact that other people are driving tons of traffic doesn't mean that even if you do, it will convert for you. Ultimately the best way to see if a keyword is right for your campaigns is to test the data on your own site to see how it performs.

So Why Use (Or Build) a Keyword Tool, Then?

Keyword research tools do have value, despite the above disclaimers. Much like services like Compete.com, they offer suggestions for next steps that are directionally indicative. We built our tool to try to help people just getting started find ideas for their industry or niche. While we tried to address some of the concerns above, the tool should still ultimately be taken with a "grain of salt": the real value of keywords isn't having a nice ordered list. It's acting on data and turning keywords into traffic and conversions.

Okay, I've tried all or most of the keyword tools referenced above. The keyword results are similar but the real issue is…what to do next. Create a page on my site with a long url that mentions the keyword?? Blog about the topic?? Try to get a few links with the keyword phrase as the link text?? Set up an Adwords campaign?? IMHO, finding the keywords is the easy part – determining what to do next is where things get difficult. Especially when the goal is converting traffic and money and time are limited.

I completely agree; the tricky thing isn't seeing that there is an opportunity, but acting on it. I think how you proceed in targeting a given keyword definitely "depends". If you have the budget I love to run an AdWords campaign to get conversion feedback for a word or phrase first. As for the content type to create for a keyword, again I think "it depends". Definitely agree that these questions get closer to the driving forces behind success than simply getting a list of keywords. Really that's a topic that deserves it's own post :).

[…] trust your keyword tool! Tom Demers recently posted on the Search Engine People blog about just why you can't put all of your eggs in one keyword tool basket? You know what I mean. It's a good discussion covering reasons to use keyword tools, tips for […]

I use market samurai and its worked wonders for me but I see your point about keyword tool accuracy. Sometimes I doubt the numbers that these tools give me. None the less I have no other way of knowing search trends or keyword searches etc. So I rely mainly on market samurai. I'm sure those that own it, know that it's one of the best out there. Keyword research is tough and these tools ease the pain a little but sometimes it doesn't hurt to apply a little common sense.

Great article. I agree that keyword research needs to be over a broader range of tools. I also use market samurai but also compare results against Google Insights as well. To be quite honest I find Google insights to be my number one tool when looking at different search terms as it provides a trends grapg which can be used world wide or targeted to one specific country. As you well know, trends come and go, what is the highest searched term this month may not be the next month or for the rest of the year…holidays & special occasions are great examples of this.

I agree with your points. Sometime they dont have enough resources for that keyword. There might be some new trend (consequently new keywords) which are yet not updated. Keyword analysis tools are not perfect but it really helps us to reduce our work